Doctoral defence: Marie-Luise Meier “Gender in games – methodology and analysis”

On 14 November at 12:15 Marie-Luise Meier will defend her doctoral thesis “Gender in games – methodology and analysis”.

Supervisors:
Professor Raili Marling, University of Tartu
Associate Professor Maria Murumaa-Mengel, University of Tartu

Oponendid:
Associate Professor Veli-Matti Karhulahti, University of Turku (Finland)
Andrei Nae, PhD, University of Bucharest (Romania)

Summary
Even today, gaming is often seen as a niche activity of children and young men. Video games, however, have become one of the most profitable entertainment media, with over 2.5 billion people worldwide playing video games in 2019. While deemed a predominantly male hobby, gaming is nearly equally attractive to female and male gamers. Most people are, by now, part of gaming culture, even if they would not classify themselves as gamers. This means that games are also attracting increasing scholarly attention. Despite the increasing research, video games still suffer from the stigma of being deemed “subcultural” and ultimately “not art”. Gaming culture is often criticized for its gender bias, racism and homophobia. Games themselves and the gender relations they communicate are also often perceived as lacking in depth. Video games, however, are not politically neutral artefacts. They present and contribute to the values, norms, and practices fostered by the culture they belong to. Researchers, however, still lack methodological approaches to analyze video games as a distinct medium and to systemize the ways in which games represent gender.

This PhD thesis aims to create a holistic methodology to analyze gender in games that focuses on games as a uniquely multidimensional medium while building on the experience of other disciplines. I will combine humanities methods like close reading with methodologies from the social sciences, drama studies, gender studies and even economics and law. These are adapted to the technicalities and particularities of games, namely the fact that they have to be played and consist of game-specific rules, objectives and mechanics. This holistic reading of games tries to overcome the indeterminacy and subjectivity in many previous approaches to game analysis.

I develop the term “preferred playing”, heavily influenced by Stuart Hall’s notion of preferred reading, that relies on default choices and other objectively identifiable features to identify the most likely text resulting from a playthrough, which in turn can then be analyzed in terms of gender. While this framework is intended for academic use, it also strives to influence public discourse by providing three-dimensional insights into gender in video games and better understanding of video games as games, i.e. inherently performative media.

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